Zohran Mamdani's reign has begun, and that means promoting his socialist wants.
It also means trashing the idea of private property ownership, something he recently did when he visited a dilapidated, rent-controlled apartment building.
ALSO SEE: Zohran Mamdani, in Office One Week, Already Displays Socialist Dysfunction
🚨🗽 BREAKING — Mayor Mamdani Inspects Capitalist Slums of NYC on 1st Day. pic.twitter.com/jjusFrdqA7
— ★★★ Pamphlets ★★★ (@PamphletsY) January 2, 2026
To be sure, that building was disgusting. I certainly wouldn't want to live there, but there are consequences to placing price controls and mountains of regulations on landlords. Namely, it drains margins and makes it prohibitive to spend money on upkeep. There are also broader consequences when left-wing governance produces a city that is grossly unaffordable to live in, leaving the poorest with no choice but to reside in such abhorrent conditions, and property owners unable to provide anything better without going bankrupt.
Mamdani's point was simple: Private landlords are evil and government-backed "affordable" housing is the way to go.
So he held a press conference at a 102-unit, government-backed apartment building to make that point while also praising it as a success of his new housing commissioner, Dina Levy. The complex, which is located on Sedgwick Avenue, was bought from private owners in 2011 with a New York City Housing Preservation and Development loan. Levy brokered that deal.
Levy did this with help from a $5.6 million HPD loan she and her own nonprofit, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, brokered to stabilize the building’s finances and maintain its “affordable” rental status, recalled Mamdani.
“Dina will no longer be petitioning HPD from the outside,” the mayor touted. “She will now be leading it from the inside, delivering the kind of change that can transform lives.”
But as with all things originating from the socialist left, the rhetoric doesn't match reality. An investigation found that the Sedgwick Avenue property had over twice the number of violations compared to the privately-owned building Mamdani had highlighted just days before as an example of supposed capitalist greed.
However, the 59-year-old building isn’t the success story Mamdani and Levy claim it to be, The Post found.
It has more than double the dangerous “Class C” violations racked up at 85 Clarkson Ave., a dilapidated, privately owned 71-unit complex in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, Mamdani showcased three days earlier as a poster child for everything he believes is wrong with the city’s publicly-subsidized housing stock.
One tenant complained of routinely having no heat or hot water, as well as rodent infestations.
Alexander, 49, who has rented her three-bedroom apartment since 1999, said the unit routinely lacks heat and hot water, its bathroom and kitchen facades are crumbling and windows need to be replaced...
...And she said she had to take care of fixing a major rodent problem in the unit herself because she “couldn’t wait any longer” for Workforce Housing Group to respond.
“Since [the nonprofit] took over, the building has deteriorated. They lack porters. No one is maintaining it, and the complaints fall on deaf ears – especially if you complain a lot,” said Alexander, adding she wishes Levy never won her fight to turn the building over to the nonprofit.
This is how socialism always ends: With leaders touting successes that are worse than the "failures." No one is denying that badly run privately-owned apartment buildings exist or that all landlords treat their tenants well. But if you are going to tackle a problem, then your solution shouldn't be worse than the problem you claimed to want to solve. Socialism doesn't require results to sustain itself, though. It simply requires rhetoric and power, both things Mamdani has in spades as he begins his tenure.
There are actually ways to improve conditions in these complexes, not the least of which is to get rid of government rent controls that crush investment, make building more housing impossible, and remove all resources for owners to improve their properties. Mamdani will never do that, though. Instead, he'll stand in front of the press and deliver lofty speeches while his actual policies result in disgusting, rodent-infested messes for his residents that are far worse than whatever existed prior.
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